Posts tagged WordPress

If only WordPress, Drupal and the like were as easy to use as Windows Live Writer (screenshot) or at least the less cluttered versions of Microsoft Word!
Inserting images and sizing and positioning them just right, for example, can be so much simpler with LW and Word. That’s why, here and here, I urged theDigital Public Library of America to come up with a good free blog editor, which in fact could be much more—a Swiss Army knife for all kinds of creation. Everything from high school term papers to heavily footnoted academic documents. You could still use WordPress, Drupal and other content management systems. But you’d do your actual writing with a Live Writer-simple...

John Miedema, who has contributed a number of articles to TeleRead, has released two WordPress plugins. Here's what the WordPress plugin directory says about BiblioShare:
The BNC BiblioShare plugin is for book reviewers, book bloggers, library webmasters, anyone who wants to put book covers and data on their WordPress blog or website. Use the plugin button in the WordPress visual editor or insert a 'shortcode' with a book number in a WordPress post, page or widget. The plugin will display a book cover image, author, and other book data from BiblioShare (http://biblioshare.org). The plugin is...

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1. Smashwords
Smashwords continues to kick goals in self-publishing. In an increasingly crowded market, I just don’t think you can beat Smashwords for ease of use, price (you can’t do better than free), and distribution. Fling your words to Smashwords, and you’ll quickly end up with an ebook in multiple formats, playable on all devices, and distributed to iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo and the Diesel eBook Store. Soon they’ll be adding Amazon to the already impressive list.
The website could use prettying up, but this offering is the best one-stop-shop free solution out there.
Other services...

A few days ago, I mentioned the WordPress plug-in PadPressed, which makes blogs resemble Wordpad documents when read on the iPad. Now our founder and editor emeritus David Rothman has put that plug-in into use on his own blog about his book, The Solomon Scandals, with an emphasis on the availability of sample chapters and other material from the book in that format. Visit it from a desktop web browser and it looks perfectly ordinary. But go there via the iPad’s Mobile Safari, and the interface becomes essentially the same as an iPad app. You can even tap...

The iPad is so popular these days that everything is coming out with special interfaces for it. There was Pulse, which turns a selection of favorite RSS feeds into something similar to a magazine. Then there was Flipboard, which does the same for links posted to social networks.
Now here are a couple more web media joining the party. Cooliris, a company known for its browser and iPhone photo apps, has created an app for the iPad called Discover that imports content from Wikipedia and reformats it into an iPad-magazine-style interface. Cooliris hopes eventually to bring the same reformatting technique...

On O’Reilly’s Tools of Change blog, Hugh McGuire—the co-developer of the Book Oven on-line content management system for publishing, among other things—explains why a better publishing platform might actually be made from Wordpress, of all things.
McGuire started Book Oven with the goal of building books “in the cloud”, so that online collaboration would be easier, and the book would be more portable to different devices. But while pitching his system he encountered suggestions that “It would be great to have a tool that’s as easy to use as Wordpress.”
That started him thinking. Wordpress is familiar to most writers...

A new ebook price comparison site has launched - EbookMetaFinder. If anyone uses it please let us know how well it works.
TeleRead contributor John Miediema says that he will be revising his OpenBook 2 WordPress plugin provides an easy way to insert book covers, titles and other bibliographic data into WordPress content. He will be adding new features and now is the time, he says, to request additional ones. Take a look here.
Martyn Daniels, at Brave New World, has some comments on the agency model. One of them is:
What the agency model clearly does is promote...